The problem
You’re about to sign off a number — a valuation, a budget, a loan you’re sure you can afford, a five-year plan that funds itself. The room is nodding. Not one assumption underneath it has been tested.
The comfortable move is to trust the spreadsheet someone built last quarter and press on. It is also how profitable companies run out of cash, how “the new machine pays for itself” becomes a write-off, and how a business the market prices at £50m gets bought for £80m because nobody rebuilt the number from its own cash flows.
In thirty years across investment banking, M&A and private equity, the deals that went wrong almost never failed on the headline. They failed on one assumption, three cells deep, that no one had flexed.
What this book gives you
How to Master Financial Models hands you the 19 models a practitioner actually reaches for — each a full chapter in plain English, each paired with a live Excel model: blue cells you change, formula cells that respond, and a Read-me tab telling you which lever to pull.
- The Three-Statement Model
- The Revenue & Expense Builds
- The Working Capital Model
- The Debt Schedule
- Scenario & Sensitivity Analysis
- IRR and NPV
- The Integrated LBO Model
- The DCF Build Model
… 19 in all, in the order you’d actually learn them.
See it move
Take the DCF. Value a business at a 9% cost of capital and 2.5% long-term growth and it’s worth about £8.46 a share. Nudge the cost of capital to 8%, or long-term growth to 3.5%, and the valuation lurches by a fifth — because the terminal value, the haziest assumption of all, is 76% of the answer. The model doesn’t hand you a number; it shows you exactly which belief the number rests on. Every one of the 19 works the same way. Not definitions — runnable models.
Buying more than one category? All 25 books and every one of the 467 models are £29.99 in the Business Framework Omnibus — less than the price of a third book. Prefer to try first? The free Framework Starter Pack gives you five complete chapters and their live Excel models.
19 frameworks. One category. The complete learning path. Every model in Financial Models — explained, applied, and ready to use.
How to Master Financial Models walks you through the complete arc: 19 models, in the order you'd actually learn them, each with a full practitioner chapter and a live Excel companion.
- 19 models across Financial Models, the complete learning path
- Full practitioner chapters plus a live Excel companion for every model
- Written from 30+ years in investment banking, M&A and private equity
Financial Models at a Glance
